High Country Nocturne

by Jon Talton

  “So you don’t have to kill me if you tell me?”

  She didn’t laugh and I regretted interrupting.

  After a moment, she continued. “The efforts to steal information didn’t stop there. Our job was to find out who were the bad guys, how big the breach was—what had they learned? Then the task was trying to feed them false information, flawed design elements. I also created a back door into their network and a malware bug that would have rocked their world, but they wouldn’t let me use it. Said it was shot down by the White House.”

  I wasn’t surprised her work would attract attention in high places. She was so damned smart and good at what she did.

  She sighed. “The damage was much worse than the brass feared. They stole design elements and critical systems information involving not only the F-35 but the F-22.”

  “Did you find out who they were?”

  “Unit 61398. No surprise, probably.”

  When she saw the My-God-you’re-naïve expression on my face, she explained.

  “It’s one of the most important hacking groups of The People’s Liberation Army. The Internet is a battlefield.”

  I let out a long breath.

  “So why would Melton have his story backward? Why did he say I needed to buy you some time because you had given the Chinese information?”

  “Because he’s evil. Because he’s using you!” Her shoulders stiffened and she used both hands to whip back her hair. She stood and walked past me to the picture window, staring out on Cypress Street.

  She whispered, “My God, you believe him!”

  “I do not.” I said it forcefully. And I meant it.

  I stood up and embraced her from behind. She pulled away.

  “Part of you believed him when he was telling you about…whatever he told you went on with me in Washington. I could see it in your face, Dave. I know you.”

  This is where I should have stopped it. Diffuse the situation. Go to bed, safe in our cocoon, you and me against the world, babe. But the alcohol truth serum was still in my bloodstream.

  I said quietly, “Maybe he was misinformed. When you came home, you told me that your security clearance had been revoked and they confiscated your laptop. Can’t you understand why I was concerned after what Melton said? Somebody could be out to get you. Blame you for something that went wrong. I’m not so naïve that I don’t know how shit rolls downhill in government agencies.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said, her voice rising uncharacteristically. “Jesus, David…”

  It was the first time I could recall her ever using my full given name.

  “Lindsey, please sit down. Let’s work this out together. I only mention the security clearance because…”

  “Oh, now you want to work it out together. Why didn’t you tell Meltdown to stick it and come home so we could work it out together then? But, no, you believed what he told you about me and you rolled over like a coward. Where else do you think I’m a liar?”

  “Hang on.”

  “Fuck you, David! You were screwing my sister right in our home.” She shook her head. “You must have felt like quite the stud.”

  I slowly shook my head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  She dropped to her haunches and stared at me.

  “Really? Tell me what it was like? Tell me everything. All the details. What it felt like. Then tell me what it felt like when Robin died.”

  I turned away from her glare, felt my cheeks burning.

  “It felt like hell.”

  There was no avoiding it.

  Robin. Lindsey’s half-sister was a curator for the art collection of a rich man in Paradise Valley. The job went away with the real-estate collapse, when his empire proved to be built on nothing but debt and promises, and he used a revolver to blow his brains all over a Frida Kahlo original hanging in his living room.

  The collection went to his creditors and Lindsey insisted Robin move into the garage apartment.

  Then a family tragedy estranged us and Lindsey fled to D.C. For months, I was sure I had lost her.

  Robin. She was a fairly close match for the actress Robin Wright with long hair, when she was younger and not anorexic. But this Robin had no glamour. She was a storm child. She always called her older sister by her first and middle names, Lindsey Faith.

  There was no excusing my part in what happened next, not Robin’s aggressiveness, not the fact that Lindsey insisted she stay here, rebuffing my suggestion that Robin move.

  Robin and I happened.

  Whatever Lindsey did in her personal life during those months, I had no right to whine or pry. I had never judged her.

  My offenses became unpardonable the night that Robin and I were in the backyard and she took a bullet intended for me. She died in my arms. The vengeance I took, on that last case as a deputy sheriff, didn’t bring her back. For a time, I wondered if Lindsey would leave me, not for having an affair with Robin but for losing her.

  Now I said, “Every day, I wish that bullet had hit me.” My voice was too loud.

  She sprang up and turned away. “Oh, please, quit feeling sorry for yourself. You did what you did, feeling like the big stud. Now you have the balls to question my integrity? To believe that badged ego telling you I’m a traitor!”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “She loved you.”

  “What?”

  “Are you a stupid person, David? Did you not hear what I said? Robin fell in love with you. She told me. I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You would barely take my phone calls then,” I said. “This is not about Robin. This is about whatever it is that Melton thinks he knows and how it could hurt us.”

  “It hurt us that you believed him.”

  “I don’t!”

  She muttered another profanity and strode across the hardwood floor to the desk, opened a drawer, and produced her blue pack of Gauloises Blondes cigarettes and lighter. Some people smoke after a meal or sex. Lindsey mostly smoked when she was under great stress.

  She said, “I don’t have to explain myself…”

  “I didn’t ask you to. I’m not the enemy.”

  “Then why are you willing to lie down with the devil!”

  We were both shouting now. Shouting fights were very rare in our marriage.

  “Now you know national security secrets I swore not to divulge. I had to tell you because you don’t trust me!”

  Re-crossing the room, she stood before me, one hand on her hip, her eyes now wide and full-on angry violet.

  “I’m going for a walk. I need to take a break from this.”

  Lindsey was almost always preternaturally calm. Not now. The tone in her voice was boiling.

  She quickly slipped on her shoes and headed to the door.

  “I never doubted you. Not for a second.”

  “Right.” A sardonic half-shout.

  “Lindsey, please. Please don’t…”

  The door closed and I spoke the last word of the sentence to myself.

  “…leave.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Later, I reflected on how a lover’s quarrel never takes a logical course and for each of us, a perilous combination of fissile materials—shame, jealousy, and regret—was waiting to create a destructive chain reaction. Later, I would wonder why, why I agreed to accept the star from Chris Melton, and boil it down to one prime motivation: fear. Unreasoning fear for Lindsey. I was ambushed and made the bad call. I was usually good under pressure. Not this time.

  But that was later.

  Now, I stewed for maybe thirty seconds and stood up.

  Outside, it was full dark, moonless, and most of the neighbors had their lights off. But I could see Lindsey, thanks to her white blouse. She was on the sidewalk almost a block away.

  She had already crossed
Third Avenue and was past the judge’s house. He and his wife sang in a band.

  The night held no band noises, barely any sounds at all. A bell from a light-rail train clanged two blocks east on Central, the direction Lindsey was heading. If you listened very carefully you could hear the continual grotesque moan of the Papago Freeway to the south.

  The street held no FBI watchers, no reporters. Not one car was parked at the curb in our block.

  I wanted to run after her but stopped myself. It would only reignite the argument. I started walking east slowly. Maybe I would catch up, maybe I would walk off my own brew of anger, confusion, and neediness. I needed her to understand why I took that file, took that oath.

  This would be a good time for one of those business cards from Peralta to turn up and tell me what the hell to do.

  I watched as Lindsey reached the gate and wall that closed off Cypress from cars at the end of the block. Pedestrians could walk through openings that lined up with the sidewalk. The wall ran nearly the length of the mile-long historic district. It was one of the horrid changes forced by the neighborhood association—I called it the Willo Soviet—to gain its support for light rail.

  The result made the neighborhood, where streets had always run straight through to Central, and when this part of town was much more crowded and busy, into a “gated community.” At least on one end.

  The gate across the street supposedly allowed emergency vehicles to come through if need be. But one day a fire truck had stopped and the firefighters had asked Lindsey if she knew the “code” to open the barrier. There was no code. It was a damned locked gate.

  The goddamned walls and gates made me angry every time I saw them. If I wanted gates and walls, I’d move to the suburbs.

  Lindsey didn’t like walking through the Wall of Willo, either. “I always wonder if somebody is waiting to mug me on the other side.” She had said this more than once.

  At least an ornamental light had been placed beside the sidewalk entrance on Cypress. It illuminated Lindsey clearly as she stepped through and disappeared on the other side, where First Avenue ran north and south. A block beyond that stood the open arms of the mid-century Phoenix Towers on Central Avenue.

  Steps on the grass made me turn.

  And there she was.

  “Fight with the wifey?” she drawled. “But you want to make it all better.”

  The woman Lindsey had nicknamed Strawberry Death was two feet away, that semi-automatic pistol of a make I had never seen before pointed at my chest. This time, no DPS uniform—she wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black running shoes. I wondered how long she had been watching.

  I opened my mouth and closed it. I was not thinking of clever comebacks.

  She drawled, “She’s pretty. A little of the Goth girl left in her. If I had time, I’d suicide you both. Suicided is better, cleaner. But I don’t have time. Where are my stones?”

  “What?”

  “Are you hard of hearing? Where are my diamonds?”

  So that’s what this was about.

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Then I’m going to have to keep the promise I made.”

  “To who?”

  “Whom,” she corrected. “You should know better, Doctor Mapstone, being an educated man. Whom.”

  My feet felt very heavy as I spoke. “To whom?”

  “Peralta.”

  Gun in your face. Buy time.

  “You told him this?”

  “I didn’t have time,” she said. “But a girl’s got to keep her promises. Now, where are my stones?”

  She smiled, showing a perfect set of white teeth, and made the mistake of taking two steps toward me as she answered.

  I quickly stepped in close, as if we were about to dance. By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. I planted my right foot and calf behind her left leg and used this as a lever to push her backwards.

  At the same moment, I grabbed her gun hand with my left hand while notching my right hand under her elbow. It incapacitated the arm, pushed the gun aside, and helped propel her off balance and down hard.

  Thanks to this straight-arm-bar, the gun came loose before she could pull the trigger and I fell on top of her.

  This should have knocked the air out of her, but it didn’t. She wrestled, punched, and made grunting and growling sounds.

  She also wore Chanel Number Five.

  My face was instantly on fire. It took a couple of seconds to realize this was a result of her raking fingernails across me. She tried a kick in the groin, but I blocked that by turning to the side. Then she bit me on the wrist.

  That let her struggle toward the pistol on the grass while I grasped the waist of her black jeans to hold her back. Her hair had come loose and I pulled on it hard. She screamed and cursed me. My reach was longer and with my other hand I tossed the gun into a hedge. Something black and sudden came into my vision, followed by pain and starbursts. She kicked me in the face with her running shoe.

  Her move toward the bushes and her weapon caused me to pull my .38. Before I could even raise the revolver, she sprinted away, leaving her pistol on the ground.

  It took me a few seconds to get my balance. She had nailed me good with that kick.

  By the time the dizziness faded, she held a good head start and she was fast.

  She ran east on Cypress.

  I pumped my arms and hammered the asphalt across Third Avenue, over the curb, and across the uneven, eighty-year-old sidewalk. But she was younger and I couldn’t catch her.

  Her lead extended. She wove in and out of palm trees on the parking lawns, making me momentarily lose sight of her.

  Suddenly Lindsey stepped back inside the wall, headed back in the direction of home, and saw us.

  Strawberry Death paused beside a palm long enough to reach toward her ankle.

  A backup gun.

  But she didn’t turn on me. Instead, she started running east again. She was thirty feet from the wall.

  I shouted, “Lindsey, run! Go back! Run!”

  Lindsey froze and stared at me, unsure of what she was seeing.

  I tried to get a clean shot but the two women were aligned and now not more than a few steps apart.

  “Deputy Sheriff, halt! Drop your weapon! I will fire!”

  Hearing this, Lindsey instantly withdrew to the other side.

  “What’s going on out there? Are you all right?” A man’s voice from a porch.

  “Get inside and call the police,” I yelled.

  Then I stopped, dropped to one knee, made my breathing slow down, and lined up the barrel on the back of the woman, the gold and red of her hair shining under the streetlight.

  I slowly let out a breath and started the trigger pull.

  But then she passed through the cut in the wall.

  And three seconds later, I heard the shot.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lindsey lay face down on the pavement.

  The back of her white blouse was red and wet with blood.

  I swept the surroundings with my .38 but the woman was gone. Then I knelt beside my wife and gently turned her over.

  “Dave…”

  “I’m here.”

  “Your face is bleeding.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Bad time for a walk, huh?” Her lips tried to smile.

  I looked around again, but the parking lots across the street were empty and the edges of the wall looked clear of any lurking killer. The half-smoked Gauloise was burning five feet away.

  “Don’t leave me.” Her voice sounded groggy.

  “No. Never.”

  “It hurts. Hurts.”

  The entry wound was in the middle of her chest.

  I needed a trauma kit.

  I needed a trauma team
with surgeons.

  Her breathing was rapid and shallow. I took her pulse. Weak, thready. Classic shock symptoms. She was bleeding out.

  “Stay with me, Lindsey. I love you. Stay awake.”

  She stared at me, tried and failed to speak while I shakily dialed 911 on my iPhone, gave our location, my badge number from memory, and called for help.

  “My wife has been shot. She’s badly wounded.”

  Fire Station Four, with a paramedic unit, was only five blocks away. I heard the sirens from McDowell. It took somewhere between forever and eternity for the first emergency lights to appear on First Avenue.

  The memory of Robin dying in my arms was banging in my vision. I couldn’t let it happen again.

  Couldn’t.

  “Keep breathing, baby. In and out.”

  She nodded.

  “Hold my hands tight.” She did, but her strength was fading.

  Then her eyes closed.

  Stripping off the blazer, I carefully rolled her to one side and used it as a makeshift dressing against her back. I wouldn’t let the word enter my mind: useless.

  Firefighters and cops were arriving. Red and blue lights bounced off the wall, doors opened and closed, and uniforms approached. I moved aside and let them work, giving a description of the shooter to an officer who broadcast it on her portable radio. A helicopter appeared overhead and blasted us with white light.

  More sirens were approaching from the distance.

  Chapter Thirteen

  St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Level One Trauma Center, was half a mile away.

  An hour later, Lindsey was still in surgery. “Critical condition.” That’s all a doctor had told me as I was sent into in a long, largely empty waiting room with a television at one end bolted near the ceiling. A Hispanic family, mother and three small children, sat near it, staring silently.

  God didn’t owe me anything. That didn’t stop me from praying for Lindsey.

  A man came in to have me sign paperwork as Lindsey’s next of kin. I had her Social Security number memorized. He seemed amazed that we had insurance. I remembered when St. Joe’s was a hospital for the elite. Now most of the patients must have been on Medicaid or nothing.